Eat Mason's dust

Mason displays his winning Pinewood Derby car and his first-place certificate

Today was Mason's last Pinewood Derby. Since we missed last year's Pinewood Derby, we decided to go all out. OK, I decided to go all out. I may have been a tad obsessive with my wheel and axle preparation. Mason, of course, did the design. It looks remarkably similar to the design of the last car—close enough that Teressa kept asking if there wasn't something else that Mason wanted to do to make it different. There wasn't. He wasn't interested in any elaborate decorations, either. All he wanted was the spoiler in back and the lightning bolts on the sides. Perhaps I spent more time that I should have on my part than I should have. Between the seven-step buffing process for the axles and the time I spent on applying graphite, I spent many hours on the project. After all the work, Mason was feeling pretty confident. I made sure to warn him that other families had done a lot of work on their cars, too.

Maybe they didn't do quite as much work as we did, though, because Mason took home the top prize. He won every heat he participated in and had the record time for the track. I think Mason was pretty excited about the results. (I have some video of Mason's reaction to the final race as proof. I may have to post it later after I load it on the computer.)

The Wright Brothers

The boys pose with the airplane model that Grandpa made for them

This Halloween, the older boys decided they wanted to dress up as the Wright brothers. Sam wanted to be a dog. That worked out well because the Wright brothers had a dog named Cisco. When Grandpa and Grandma Scott came to visit right before Halloween, Grandpa built a replica of the Wright brothers' plane. He built it out of a discarded grocery cart. It was a rather sizable replica so fortunately, it could be dismantled. Otherwise, Teressa might not have had room to park the van in the garage.


Emotions during the photo shoot ran the gamut

Since I happened to be stuck in Iraq during the Halloween season, I didn't have the opportunity to photograph the boys in their costumes. So we pulled everything back out this week and finally got those photographs. I had forgotten just how challenging trying to photograph three boys can be. We finally got some good photos, but it took a while.

Sam's first fish

Here's Sam with his first fish

I was going through some photos today when I realized that I had never posted this picture. We went out to Canyon Lake early this summer to do a little fishing, and even Sam got in on some of the action. He was initially quite excited, but it took a little convincing to get him to stand next to the fish to get his picture taken.

Filling a hole

Earlier this year, we sprung a water leak in the garage. I had to cut into the drywall until I finally found the source of the leak. Yesterday, I evened out my jagged hole until it looked like the photo above. Then I cut some new sheetrock to fit the hole. Then I filled in the gaps. Maybe tomorrow I will attempt to sand and texture. At any rate, at least I managed to cover the hole on the wall.

-- Post From My iPhone

Big ball of wax

We went to Mason's school this morning to see the wax museum. And by wax museum I mean a bunch of kids dressed up as historical figures and pretending to be in a wax museum. When you hit a button next to them, they would start speaking and educate you about their character. It was quite a creative idea. Mason chose to be Julius Caesar. He had his lines down and sounded quite authoritative. Of note, we noticed that to be seen as important to a third grader, it seems to help if you were assassinated.

-- Post From My iPhone

Going off the grid

Using this converter sold by Apple, I was able to hook up to our television

When the cable bill came last month, Teressa had had enough. This time it was AT&T jacking the price up. Teressa had cancelled Time Warner the year before when they had done the same thing. This year it was AT&T's turn. For a while we entertained the idea of getting satellite, but we were seeing a pattern here. What was going to keep the satellite company from doing the same thing to us in a year? Add to this the fact that we just don't watch that much television. There are a total of two shows that we consider must see television—24 and Psych. In the past, we have had times when we made due with rabbit-ear antennas, but our televisions are the old analog kind, so that would have necessitated buying converter boxes. Then Teressa ask, "Do you think you could hook up the computer to the TV?"

Well, that seemed like a good idea. After some research, it became apparent that this was easier to do with a digital television, but with the right connectors, it should work in theory. I found the video converter pictured above that Apple sells. Now I should only need an s-video cable and an audio cable. So I went to Radio Shack. The Radio Shack guy didn't quite believe I could pull it off. He was wrong.

So now we watch our TV over the Internet. iTunes, Hulu and Netflix all work great. It may be a little harder to watch sports, but it's not exactly like we were getting a lot of BYU games anyway. And all for less than the price of one month's worth of cable. I love technology.

Photos in the flowers

Teressa says this is one of her favorite photos of Sam ever


Spencer was my easiest subject to shoot. He pretty much did whatever I asked


We never did get a decent shot of Mason all alone, but he did have some cute ones with the other boys

When there is a rainy spring in Texas, the wildflowers come out in bunches. There's a field that we drive by whenever we go anywhere. Normally its just plain old cow pasture, but this spring it blossomed out with Texas bluebonnets. Ever since, Teressa has had me on a quest to take pictures of wildflowers. Last Saturday, we went to a different field nearby. This field was filled with yellow wildflowers (as you can see from the photos above). We spent a hour shooting photos of the boys in the flowers, and when it was over, our pants were covered with yellow pollen. We'll enjoy the wildflowers for a few more weeks before we get back to regular old dry, dusty south central Texas.